The 1996 'Rachel', created for Jennifer Aniston in the sitcom Friends Photo: EUGENE ROBERT RICHEE

Artist's impression of an Ancient Greek hairstyle

Last year's 'Liquid Ruby Red', modelled on the 'Peek-a-boo' style made famous by Veronica Lake in the 1940s

Aside from a brief fin-de-siècle phase involving a Toni & Guy colourist and some enthusiastic shades of red I'm a fairly low-maintenance hair girl. My default hairstyle is shoulder-length with what my mum calls 'blonde-y bits'. I rarely bother with blow-dries, I don't use straighteners or curling tongs, and ponytails feel like a bit of a headache. Compared with, say, Cheryl Cole's levels of hair maintenance, I'm something of a tramp.

Related articles

Infocus Related products

It's all relative, though. As a new book,
Hairstyles: Ancient to Present
by Charlotte Fiell, reveals, what women through the ages have done to and for a good head of hair is astonishing. Even Cole, devoted as she is to her colour changes and fabulous up-dos and volumising extensions or wefts that give her hair such blessed abundance (a stylist recently informed me that 'everyone you see on TV' has supplementary hair fixed in to pad out her own), comes across a bit slummy compared with the Parisian women of the 1770s.

Talk about high maintenance. The top style of 1772 was 'the full headdress' or 'opera box', a do that measured four feet from the chin to top of the head (Marge Simpson, eat your heart out). In the first ever hair magazine, published in the city in the same year, an astonishing 3,744 different hairstyles were listed, 'some of which necessitated the hairdresser having to climb a small ladder…'

'Our hairstyles reflect our self-image as individuals set against the prevailing culture of our times,' writes Fiell. Her book brims with visual and anecdotal illustrations of this: flappers styling their new-found political and social freedom into the shape of the short, flat bob, which 'swept aside centuries of carefully constructed hairpieces, festoons of ribbons and elaborate pinning'; the hippies and their long, unkempt locks in contrast to the rock-hard sets of the mainstream. Hairstyles can be powerful symbols, and even now they have the potential to shock - think of the reaction when Britney Spears, the golden mermaid-haired girl of the new millennium, took a razor to her head.

In some ways the history of women's hairstyles can be read as a history of dissatisfaction. Curlier, straighter, longer, shorter, darker, lighter - the desire to turn it into something other is insistent and goes way back. The ancient Egyptians shaved off their natural hair to don the blunt-fringed wigs we so strongly associate with them. Wigs and wig boxes from Egyptian tombs can be found in the British Museum. Women who couldn't afford real hair made do with woollen versions, poor things.

The Greeks were the first to go gaga over blondes, with some pioneering types attempting to bleach. Sadly, the book has no before-and-after images of this, but Sappho's lines in praise of the fairer-haired remain: '… the girl whose hair is yellower / Than torchlight need wear no / Colourful ribbon from Sardis - / But a garland of fresh flowers.' Ah, it was ever thus.

Whether applying peroxide, sodium hydroxide or hot irons, attempting to sleep in rollers or with those hard sticky knobs that attach extensions of someone else's hair to your own, women have done dangerous and painful things to get their hair to do what it won't do naturally. (In the Middle Ages they were all for high foreheads - so much more noble, darling - which meant that pesky low-lying hairlines had to be plucked. Ouch…)

Not that pain and effort is any guarantee of appreciation. Fiell quotes from a letter of 1671 written by a Madame de Sévigné about the experimental Duchesse de Nevers, who entered a room 'with her hair dressed in the most ludicrous fashion… [it] had been cut and rolled on paper curlers, which had made her suffer death and agony a whole night long. Her head was like a little round cabbage - nothing at the sides. My dear, it is the most ridiculous sight you can imagine.'

With the industrial revolution, came the possibilities of commercial success through hairdressing. Marcel Grateau was not the first to make a fortune out of hair (a 'blonde epidemic' in Roman times saw the price of real blonde hair from Germany sky-rocket), but he was the first to make an international name. His eponymous wave created with his special heated 'ondulation' tongs in 1872 remains instantly recognisable today. 'Fashions may come and go but every woman in her heart yearns for wavy hair,' he said.

In 1907 another Frenchman, Eugène Schueller, had an even longer-lasting effect on the modern beauty regime when he formulated a hair dye that he christened Auréale, later L'Oréal. For the first time it was easy and safe for a woman to have her natural colour changed, although it was another 50 years before Clairol launched the first one-step home hair-colour kit, with its advertising slogan so characteristic of the mistrustful 1950s: 'Does she… or doesn't she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.' Within six years 70 per cent of women were colouring their hair - and doubtless 69 per cent lying about it.

Since then we have lived through bouffant and beehives, the Bauhaus-influenced cuts of Vidal Sassoon, the all-American flicks of the 1970s, punk's granny-scaring mohicans and, gulp, the 1980s. After the excess of New Romantic asymmetrical fringes, multicoloured dreadlocks and the hairstyle to end all hairstyles, the mullet, that decade seems to have pretty much done for our desire to make big, bold statements.

And so today we find ourselves in fairly conventional hair times. Even the international hair phenomenon of the 1990s,
Jennifer Aniston's 'Rachel'
, was a rather wispy, nondescript affair. The emphasis in the past two decades has been less on drama and more about healthy, good-looking hair - not necessarily your own colour or even your own hair if you use extensions, but luminous and preferably long.

In many ways, women's prayers have been answered. With technology on our side we have all the products and tools we need to take our hair to its optimum glossy potential. Hair has never looked better. And yet looking through this book at all the pinning, the powdering and the perspiration, the intricate ritual of hairstyling through the centuries, it's hard not to feel that somehow, possibly, we're missing out.